… there are lots of cases where “the narrative” — the method of organizing disparate facts for easy transmission and digestion — becomes The Narrative, all caps, the conspirazoid stuff. Al from da Nort brought up the POW/MIA thing from the Vietnam War, which is a great example. […] back in the 1980s The Narrative (note the capital letters) was that the Vietnamese government was still holding American prisoners of war for some reason.
It routinely showed up on the “news magazine” shows, and of course there were whole series of movies about it: The Missing in Action flicks with Chuck Norris, Rambo II, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. And though the “firsthand testimony” for this thesis was always of the “somebody knew somebody who heard from somebody that Lt. Smith suddenly disappeared from a POW camp back in 1968,” there was one seemingly strong piece of archival evidence: The seemingly disproportionate number of soldiers and airmen officially listed as “missing in action”.
And yet … c’mon, man, as a guy who dodged that war probably said back when he could still remember what century he’s living in. Why would the Vietnamese do that? All the mooted explanations — slave labor, selling captured pilots to the Russians for training purposes — didn’t pass the smell test. So a historian started digging into it, and while I read MIA: Mythmaking in America 30 years ago in college, I remember the crux of his argument:
In the war’s early days, the military used a statistic called KIA/BNR — killed in action / body not recovered. Everyone knows Lt. Smith is dead, but since his aircraft was vaporized by a SAM over Haiphong, his remains can’t be returned to his people. As Al notes, though, when a pilot was killed in action, his wife and kids got a puny condolence check from the government and kicked out of base housing. Thus the surviving pilots, acting from noble motives, started fudging. “Well … maybe Lt. Smith’s plane wasn’t vaporized. I might’ve seen a chute. It’s all very confusing; remember I was going Mach 1 at the time, dodging flak …” Mrs. Smith and the little Smiths get to keep drawing a paycheck, keep living on base housing, etc. So the official MIA list grew.
Enter Richard Nixon and that sneaky rat fuck Kissinger. Needing a way to prolong the war while concluding “peace with honor” — that is, to weasel out without seeming too weaselly — they needed a sticking point at the treaty table. The MIA issue was perfect for that. What about Lt. Smith? Of course the Vietnamese government can’t account for him; he was blown to atoms over Haiphong; but there’s his name on the missing list. Perhaps he’s in double secret prison!
And thus “the narrative” — the perfectly understandable-in-context lie that changed KIA/BNR to MIA — became “The Narrative”, that the Vietnamese were, for some unfathomable reason, still hanging on to captured American servicemen. Who knows why those inscrutable Orientals do anything, and what kind of America-hating hippie scum are you to ask questions? Don’t you want to bring our boys back home?
Severian, “Kayfabe”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
October 13, 2021
QotD: The POW/MIA theories from the post-Vietnam War era
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